Many IT departments often hear that they need to improve their information flow to the end users during the life cycle of a work item. To improve this, we can create subscriptions or workflows to automatically send e-mail notifications when working with work items, such as an incident. Subscriptions and workflows can be triggered when a work item fulfills a criterion. For instance, this could be when the status if an incident changes from Active to Resolved, or when the Escalated checkbox is checked.
In order to send outgoing mails from SCSM, you need to configure a notification channel. If you haven't done so, follow these steps:
- Open the Service Manager Console and go to the Administration workspace.
- Expand Notifications and select Channels.
- Double-click on the E-mail Notification Channel to open the properties.
- Enable e-mail notifications by checking the Enable e-mail notifications checkbox.
- Enter the Return e-mail address (if you are using the Exchange Connector, the reply address should match the incoming address for the connector).
- Now click on the Add... button.
- Enter the SMTP server address and set Authentication Mode to Windows Integrated.
- Click on OK to close the Add SMTP server dialog.
- Click on OK to close the Configure E-Mail Notification Channel dialog.
In this example, we will take a look at how to create a subscription to notify the affected user that a new incident has been created. To do so, follow these steps:
- Open the Service Manager console and go to the Administration workspace.
- Expand Notifications and select Subscriptions.
- Click on Create Subscription in the task pane on the right-hand side.
- Skip the Before You Begin step by clicking on Next.
- Enter Incident - New Incident Notification as the name of the subscription.
- In the Description field, enter This notification is used to notify the affected user upon creating a new incident.
- Make sure that the When to notify drop-down box has When an object of the selected class is created selected.
- Click on Browse... next to Targeted Class, select the Incident class, and click OK.
- Specify in which management pack you want to save this workflow and then click on Next:
- In the Additional Criteria step, don't enter anything and click on Next.
- In Template step, click on Select... and select the End User Notification Template. Click OK followed by Next to move to the next step.
- In the Recipient step, don't enter anything and click on Next.
- In the Related Recipients step, click on Add... and while Incident is selected on the left side in the dialog box, select Affected User on the right side. Click Add to add this recipient.
- Click on Next to get to the Summary step and then click Create followed by Close.
Whenever a new incident is created and fulfills the criteria specified in our subscription, SCSM will send an e-mail to the affected user using the End User E-mail notification template. Since we didn't specify a criterion, this workflow will be triggered on the creation of all incidents.
When creating the subscription as described, we used an out-of-the-box notification template to send our e-mail. Even though this works, you should consider creating your own e-mail notification templates for subscriptions and workflows. By doing so, you can specify the exact wording and format of the e-mail, and you can choose to insert properties of the actual incident that triggered the outgoing e-mail into the template.
If you are using the Exchange Connector to handle incoming e-mails, you are required to add the ID of the work item within square brackets (for instance, [IR319]) in the subject of the e-mail. By doing this, replies to notifications from the system will be added in the action log of the work item instead of creating a new work item.
Tip
If you have configured the notification channel in SCSM and created the subscription as described in the recipe, and still don't receive an e-mail, there might be an issue with your e-mail server or antivirus application. Many e-mail servers won't allow other servers to send e-mails (relay) and would require an authorizing configuration by an administrator. Additionally, some antivirus applications block outgoing e-mails from servers. You may have to configure exceptions in the relevant antivirus application to allow the SCSM workflow server to send e-mails.
Subscriptions and workflows are mentioned in this recipe but we only looked at creating a subscription. However, both of these can be used to send outgoing e-mail notifications.
So, when should you use one or the other? To start with, workflows can only be created for activities, change requests, incidents, release records, and service requests, while subscriptions can be created for any class in the system (including configuration items). Next, workflows can use different notification templates for different recipients; in subscriptions, all recipients will get the same notification template. Workflows also have the ability to apply a work item template to the work item triggering the workflow, which can be very useful in certain scenarios.
Subscriptions, on the other hand, can send periodical notifications, and notifications to a certain user even if that user does not have a relation to the actual item triggering the subscription. This can be useful for sending notifications to the management team when an SLA is breached for instance.
So, the answer to the question is, it depends on the situation. If you don't know which one to use, try to stick with subscriptions as it gives you an easier overview of all the created notifications and also supports all classes in the system.
- For more information regarding notification channels and notification templates, please see the Creating formatted e-mail notification templates and Configuring global e-mail notification infrastructure settings recipes in Chapter 2, Personalizing SCSM 2016 Administration
- For more information regarding workflows and notifications, please see the Creating Service Request notifications recipe in Chapter 5, Deploying Service Request Fulfillment